Trans Activism and the Destruction of the Gestalt

We are artificially hampering the powers of our own brains

La Seine à la Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat (1884)

Gestalt—German for “shape” or “form”—refers to the idea of a whole being more than the sum of its parts. It also describes how our brains are able to perceive wholes all at once rather than only after processing individual elements separately. For example, when you see a dotted outline of a shape, you can perceive the shape even though no full lines are actually drawn. In everyday life, it’s the way we can identify and recognize faces without analyzing every feature. Likewise, it describes how, the vast majority of the time, we can instantly tell the sex of a person without having to catalog and categorize their various characteristics.

If you think about it, our ability to perceive a whole all at once rather than only after adding up the parts is really quite astonishing. It is an immediate type of knowing. We are able to look at the world and, in many instances, extract accurate knowledge in an instant manner. While some people think it would be cool to have psychic abilities, I think that the inherent abilities of our brains begin to look pretty damn near magical.

Of course, this is not the only way perception works. Sometimes, such as when we encounter something new or when we want to look at something in more detail, we pay attention to its various parts, what role they play, and how they fit together. This is also an important ability.

But without Gestalt perception, our world would fall apart. Before recognizing a friend, we would have to consciously note features such as the color of their eyes, the shape of their mouths, and how their ears stick out just so. After considering how each feature looks and is arranged, we might be able to hazard the educated guess that this is indeed our friend. We simply wouldn’t be able to function in a natural and normal human way. In fact, a disturbance of Gestalt perception is a feature in serious mental disorders such as schizophrenia.

We take for granted how we perceive the world and what it takes for life to flow as it does. I think this is especially true in an age that has been dominated by computers and computational models. It is easy to think that we also function like computers, which follow a step-by-step series of calculations before generating an output, but we most assuredly do not. (Perhaps AI and its generative abilities will change our view; we will see.)

Because we take it for granted, we foolishly think we can run roughshod over human nature and the way our brains work through sheer desire and force of will. Trans activism and its demand that we recognize people as the opposite sex is a great example of this.

Trans activists have a completely different theory of how human perception works. Or, more accurately, trans activists want to force human perception to work in the way they would rather it work. They want people to pause and do an inventory of various sex and/or “gender” characteristics and accouterments before slotting a person into the category of “male” or “female” (or non-binary, or some other made-up category). They want people to pause while looking at a male person and say to themselves: “Long hair—check. Makeup—check. Women’s clothing—check. Ah-ha! That means this person is female!”

It’s like asking us to look at each individual dot in a pointillism painting before we are allowed to know what is being depicted. Of course, this is not how it works. When you look at the Seurat piece above, you know right away that you are looking at a riverbank scene. Likewise, a male person has almost always been correctly identified as male in an instant and Gestalt fashion long before someone even has the wherewithal to note his particular fashion choices. It is true that nonconforming characteristics can confuse us sometimes. Because I have short hair, I have at first glance been mistaken for a man! However, the second someone takes a more full look, they realize they have made a mistake.

Yes, there are some people who do pass as the opposite sex quite well, but they are few and far between. And—I would like to note—when the goal is to actually “pass,” then the trans-identified person is at least trying to work hand-in-hand with natural human perception. Say what you will about the deeper ethics of that, but at least the onus of eliciting the desired perception and reaction is on the person trying to pass. This was the old-school way of doing things, but it’s passé. Now, the person doing the perceiving is supposed to pause and try to deduce what someone identifies as based on a few confusing social cues, like hair length.

Even when trans-identified people go down the surgical route, they are often disappointed because, again, tweaking a few physical characteristics is rarely going to override the overall maleness or femaleness of their whole physical body, particularly in males. It is especially disturbing to me when, in the hopeless pursuit of passing, they go through “facial feminization surgery” to tweak multiple facial features—such as their jawline, nose, and hairline—only to still look unmistakably male. They labor under the false perceptual theory that ticking enough boxes will add up to “female” in the minds of people who are looking at them.

I have pity for those stuck in this helpless pursuit because it is such a waste of time and energy that they could be directing elsewhere. However, my pity often evaporates when they rage at others for not reading their slightly lowered hairlike and tweaked chin as female and continuing to call them “sir.”

And make no mistake, it is more than just a few pitiable men who want us to be at war with our own perceptions. The entire trans activism machine has adopted this artificial and calculating view of life. You’ll find it folded up into their language at every turn. One particularly nefarious phrase I have seen gaining more traction is “sex characteristics,” which is often used in place of “sex.” These social conditioners would like us not to think of sex as an indivisible whole but rather as mix-and-match characteristics that come together in various ways to form a malleable configuration that lies somewhere on a spectrum.

But this couldn’t be more incorrect. Our sex is as inseparable from our nature as our humanness. I’m not just a human—I am a human female who shares a reproductive sex category with every other female in every other species on this planet. Cutting my hair short doesn’t make me any more male than painting spots on would make me a leopard. Trying to make us artificially blind to the sex of other people is like trying to make us blind to the fact that they are human.

Trans activism has unforgivably overstepped in its attempt to condition us to deny what we know viscerally, instantly, and accurately. It sucks the vitality and spontaneity out of life in favor of turning us into calculating machines attempting to generate an output that is permissible rather than true. But doing this is exhausting, if not downright paralyzing. All of the real-world harms of gender ideology are underlaid by this grievous psychological and philosophical error. A life where you are not free to think and feel immediately is a tragedy.

Some people think that those of us who hammer on about the reality of sex and the impossibility of changing it are causing a fuss over nothing, even if they agree with us. Everyone knows that, they’ll say, but you’re hurting some people’s feelings by talking about it, so can’t you just keep quiet? To that, I’ll say first that we have been incredibly foolish and naive to take this knowledge for granted. There is a growing mass of people now who, despite their own perceptions, are truly confused about the reality of sex and therefore of humanity itself.

Obviously, we shouldn’t want to live in a world where a significant proportion of people are that confused about biology. But on a deeper level, we shouldn’t want to live in a world where a significant portion of people fight against some of their most incredible natural abilities and demand that the rest of us do the same. As I said at the beginning: what the brain can do—the way it can perceive and know things wholly and all at once rather than having to wait to add everything up piece-by-piece—is really quite magical. Personally, I’d say it’s nothing short of miraculous. And yet here some of us are fighting this amazing ability mostly for the sake of remaining in the favor of our political tribe.

I think that debasing ourselves this way does great harm to our minds and our souls, and I want better for us. I want us to live fully, not to shrink small and be stifled by ideologues who punish us for something as basic, immediate, and instinctual as correctly perceiving the sex of the person we are looking at. At the very minimum, we are meant to have freer minds than that.